How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances!
- [Circumstance]

How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of
reality,--a place, a country, a local habitation! how the events
of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the
well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us!
Here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beautified and
canonized forever, with the flood of a great joy; and here are
dim and silent places,--rooms always shadowed and dark to us,
whatever they may be to others,--where distress or death came
once, and since then dwells forevermore.
- [Association]

I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which
women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortunes.
- [Endurance]

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To
me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.
- [Courtship]

I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts
a parent can bestow.
- [Home]

It buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every
resentment.
- [Tombs]

It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create
themselves, springing up under every disadvantage, and working
their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.
- [Perseverance]

It is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is
irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut
out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic
power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant
visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a
dungeon.
- [Imagination]

It lightens the stroke to draw near to Him who handles the rod.
- [Prayer]

It was Shakespeare's notion that on this day birds begin to
couple; hence probably arose the custom of sending fancy
love-billets.
- [Valentine's Day]

It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children
feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value
this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent
can bestow.
- [Home]

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds
rise above them.
- [Misfortune]

Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife
and enmity of three.
- [Marriage]

Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assuduities of art,
with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the
vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the
seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among
the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the
thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and
then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely
up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all
the beauties of vegetation.
- [Genius]

Nothing can be more touching than to behold a soft and tender
female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to
every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous paths of
life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and
supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding with
unshrinking firmness the bitterest blast of adversity.
- [Wives]

O woman! thou knowest the hour when the goodman of the house
will return, when the heat and burden of the day are past; do not
let him at such time, when he is weary with toil and jaded with
discouragement, find upon his coming to his habitation that the
foot which should hasten to meet him is wandering at a distance,
that the soft hand which should wipe the sweat from his brow is
knocking at the door of other houses.
- [Wives]

Over no nation does the press hold a more absolute control than
over the people of America, for the universal education of the
poorest classes makes every individual a reader.
- [Newspapers]

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection.
Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who
thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts.
- [Style]

Rising genius always shoots forth its rays from among clouds and
vapors, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it
ascends to its steady and meridian lustre.
- [Genius]

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every
bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling
verdure of a velvet surface.
- [Society]

Sweet is the memory of distant friends!
Like the mellow rays of the departing sun,
It falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.
- [Friends]

That inexhaustible good-nature which is the most precious gift of
Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of
thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest
weather.
- [Good Nature]

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a
distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a
nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
- [Literature]

The man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to
have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into
his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently
conceals them.
- [Talking]